Alfonso² Peterssen

Alfonso² Peterssen is the founder of Quixotic AI, building an AI stack from first principles for the JVM. His work challenges the belief that modern AI has to run outside the JVM.
Instead of wrapping Python runtimes or stitching together external systems, he brings AI directly into the JVM, where it can run and scale as part of the platform itself.

As a former Senior Researcher on Oracle’s GraalVM team, he created Espresso, the first spec-compliant meta-circular JVM written entirely in Java.

Today, he focuses on bringing AI and the JVM together by running the same code across CPUs and accelerators and pushing computation to the hardware that can execute it best. The approach is pragmatic: stay in Java and offload to C, CUDA, Metal, HIP, OpenCL, Mojo, and beyond when it matters. The goal is simple and uncompromising: write once, accelerate everywhere.

Through projects like Llama3.java and Gemma4.java, he demonstrated that high-performance AI implementations in pure Java are possible.
Based in Zurich, he works at the intersection of compilers, runtime systems, and AI to redefine what’s possible on the JVM.